Hi! This is the obligatory post to introduce myself, according to the
rules at
http://www.metagovernment.org/wiki/Participate#Join_the_Startup_Committee
My name is Jonas Liljegren. I live in Göteborg in Sweden.
http://www.metagovernment.org/wiki/User:Jonas_Liljegren
I am a visionary futurist, interested in promising alternatives in all
fields. I have been thinking about smarter computers since about 1980
and about direct democracy since about 1990.
I felt that the time was right for direct democracy in Sweden around
2006. That was the year the Swedish Pirate Party was founded. The rise
of yet another "single-question" party reaffirmed the need for the
ability to vote for more than one party in the national elections.
Sweden also had it's first web-based direct democratic party
successfully getting into power in Vallentuna in Sweden in 2002. They
got re-elected in 2006. They got re-elected again in 2010.
Sweden has a minimal requirement for parties in order to get parliament,
and that is to get 4% of the votes. That equals about 250.000 votes.
Aktiv Demokrati got about 85 votes in the last election.
I decided to dive into Aktiv Demokrati in 2010 and started to transform
the party. I have now replaced and updated the website. Cleaned up and
improved the forum, blog, and more. Trying to give a much better
impression and to communicate the idea in a clear way.
Aktiv Demokrati has existed since 2002. But none of the active members
had any programming skills. From that perspective you could say that we
haven't even started yet. But I'm now determined to make this happen.
It's time to actually implement the online direct democracy system. The
manifest was written in about 2002. An english version of it is found
here: http://aktivdemokrati.se/manifesto/
There actually was an implementation of the system, that's still in
development. But the programmer never helped to install the system and
the people in the paty at the time didn't know how to do it. That system
is DemoWave. http://home.gna.org/demowave/ Latest version is availible
here: https://github.com/redhog/DemoWave
I have programmed in Perl for many years and spent the last 10 years
building an application framework based on RDF. That has been a one-man
project for all this time, but it's a very useful and (in my taste)
impressive system. My brother has actually helped me in development and
he is also using the system for several websites. He (Fredrik) actually
did an implementation of our system with delegation and the system for
continuous voting, that you can se explained in the bottom half of the
manifesto. That implementation is working and has good potential. The
git archive is here: http://git.para.se/?p=active_democracy.git -- But
it uses the framework that I have developed. It's good but I don't
think that anybody has ever installed it without my explicit help.
I'm currently evaluating the options for going forward. I looked around
and collected a few projects for further evaluation.
http://aktivdemokrati.se/programvara/
Aktiv Demokrati has 10 years of discussions about the implementation.
Let's take the next step.
--
jonas at aktivdemokrati.se | Göteborg | http://www.aktivdemokrati.se/